Journal article
Parents’ responses to teacher qualifications
S Chang, DA Cobb-Clark, N Salamanca
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization | Elsevier | Published : 2022
Abstract
We identify the causal effect of children being assigned to more highly qualified teachers on their parents’ investments. Exploiting a unique setting in which teachers are randomly assigned to classes, we show that parents respond to more qualified teachers by increasing their children's private tutoring. A potential mechanism is an increase in parents’ belief that achievement is driven by student effort—for which tutoring is instrumental. Teacher qualifications are unrelated to test scores, however. Instead, they weaken students’ beliefs that effort is important for achievement, suggesting that private tutoring may have a demotivating effect on students. We conclude that family-wide behavio..
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Grants
Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Boer Xia for her excellent research assistance and the Survey Research Data Archive (SRDA) in Taiwan, es-pecially Wan-wen Su, for facilitating our analyses of the Taiwan Education Panel Survey. We thank Alexandra de Gendre, Jan Feld, and Johannes Kunz for their helpful comments, and Melisa Bubonya, Abraham Chigavazira, and Tiffany Ho and Hebe Williams for their excellent research assistance. This research was supported by the University of Melbourne Early Career Researcher Grant Scheme [project number CE140100027] and the Australian Research Council through the Cen-tre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course [project number CE200100025] . The Centre is adminis-tered by the Institute for Social Science Research at The University of Queensland, with nodes at The University of West-ern Australia, The University of Melbourne and The University of Sydney. This paper uses data from the Taiwan Educa-tional Panel Survey (Restricted Access Data) (R010 0 01) [data files: w1_j_s_lv6_0, w2_j_s_lv6.1, w1_j_p_lv6.0, w2_j_p_lv6.0, w1_j_dt_lv6.1, w2_j_dt_lv6.1, w1_j_dtc_lv6.2, w1_j_sch_ov6.0] . Available from Survey Research Data Archive, Academia Sinica. doi:10.6141/TW-SRDA-R010001-1. License number: SRDAR012018001.